Baseball North: It's A Different Kind of Marketing Up Here
There is nothing worse in any product marketing than to be irrelevant. For a sports team, being irrelevant is the ultimate sin. Particularly if you are a team that is loaded with young talent such as the Toronto Blue Jays.

Now, pile on top of all of that these following facts; the relationship between the client (Blue Jays) and the agency, (MacLaren McCann) is just starting, it is the beginning of January without a storyboard in sight and hockey is not a sport, it is a religion. Also, there is tremendous pressure to get the phones ringing and get tickets sold. In other words, everyone has to move a mountain so everyone had better grab a shovel.

Over the winter, the Baseball North concept had been developed by MacLaren McCann using high-end player images and clever lines in an outdoor and transit campaign. On top of this skeleton, we decided to build the muscle of relevance.

Together, we came to the determination that television was going to make the biggest initial impact for the launch of our regular season campaign. In the past, commercials for the Blue Jays had been taped. Last season's campaign, due to a number of factors had sort of a warm, Ken Burns documentary feel to it. Most sports team commercials have an athlete saying a line like "Hey! We want to see you out here!" followed by game footage with the used car/drag racing/overheated voiceover of "COME ON OUT TO THE GAME. SATURDAY IS THE RATTLESNAKE ROUND-UP BROUGHT TO YOU BY SPONSOR. THE FIRST FIVE THOUSAND FANS GET TO GO ON THE FIELD TO ROUND UP LIVE RATTLESNAKES!" Neither of these approaches fit the 2003 Blue Jays' needs.

We needed to show the players as approachable. We needed to position the Blue Jays as Canada's team. We had to say we were unique. Thus, Baseball North grew into Baseball North, It's A Different Kind of Game Up Here. The commercials showed our players in humorous situations - dumping a frozen block of Gatorade on a coach after a game, hitting the opposing catcher after mistaking the manager and coach swatting black flies as a sign or the Jeanette McDonald/Nelson Eddy delusion of the staff ace Roy Halladay in a dress after the hitter, Chris Woodward, has been beaned.

Also, the idea that it was a different kind of game would help the Blue Jays market down two paths. The first, involved using aspects of the Canadian culture in the ads. The second revolves around the organizational philosophy of General Manager J.P. Ricciardi. Through shrewd moves, scouting and player development, J.P. wants to build this team into a winner. The style of baseball is going to be efficient - get hitters on base and get them in, pitch strikes in a quick manner. By not going for the free agent flavor of the day, J.P. has changed the way this team is built. This is a significant difference that consumer's felt is credible.

Obviously, this was not only a different kind of game up here, it was a different kind of ad campaign. That was and is sort of the point. We needed something that would do more than alert the fans to the fact tickets were on sale, we had to drive talk. Television would be the set-up for everything we were going to do from that point forward. It would give the team a fresh look.

In most forms of advertising, a sports franchise, with its limited resources cannot buy in the weight necessary to get the message out to the public. There is no way in newspaper or out-of-home to spend the amount of dollars necessary to stand out from the car companies, supermarkets, department stores and other large advertisers. Because our ads were concentrated in a six week buy, mostly in prime time on shows that fit our target demographic, we were able to have an immediate impact. Another point to be made here, sports franchises, through their broadcast agreements receive a large number of spot avails. Therefore, we have the ability, in this medium to stand out amongst the other advertisers.

That being said, newspaper, radio and out-of-home are definitely part of the Blue Jays' media mix. You may have seen or heard about a newspaper ad of a Yankee cap with what appeared to be bird doo on it and a headline in Japanese urging Blue Jays fans to boo the latest high priced, high profile Yankee signing. Yes, controversy swirled. By the time the smoke cleared, the Blue Jays had their largest crowd since 1995 and television ratings for the season opener were 38% higher than the previous season. The first part of our mission has been accomplished, now we have the rest of the season to execute the other elements of our campaign.

One more thing, attend a Blue Jays game and bring a client.

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Jim Bloom is the Toronto Blue Jays Director of Consumer Marketing. Last season, he was with the Oakland A's. Their television campaign was won first place in the Team Marketing Report National Sports Forum Ad-It-Up Awards surveying all sports franchise advertising.